blink design library

Introducing What's New

I cringe a bit when I hear someone say they need to "educate their users." This sometimes reflects a company's attitude that their users must conform to their world, not the other way around.

Still, users often aren't aware of useful features that could help them accomplish their goals quickly and more easily. One way of increasing awareness is alerting people when new features are available.

Yahoo Mail recently introduced a new set of features called Yahoo Shortcuts by showing an interstitial page (a page displayed before taking a user to their Mailbox).  The page explained the new features and included a link to turn them off  if the user so desired:

(Click image above to view full-sized)

This page only appeared once: the first time a user attempted to access their Mailbox where the new features were enabled.

Many desktop applications use a similar approach. When a user launches the application, the system displays a dialog box with options to learn about new product features:

In this approach, the dialog continues to display each time the application is launched--until the user changes the preference (in this case de-selects "show this window on startup").

Both these approaches assume users want to proactively learn about features. In reality, most users prefer to learn by doing, even if they ultimately miss the full benefit of the application. This is known as the paradox of the active user.

Encouraging Learning

Similar to the progress bar that LinkedIn uses to encourage users to complete their profile, Wetpaint uses a progress bar to encourage its users to engage in learning.

From: Wetpaint

Overall, getting users to proactively learn a system is a challenge. People tend to just jump right in and start working. This tendency is known as the paradox of the active user because in the long term people would save time by spending time up-front in learning.

Field Tips

This is similar in concept to the dynamic help display shown here, but works even if there isn't blank page space adjacent to the fields. When the cursor is in a field, the field tip is displayed as a call-out to the right of the field.

From: Vox

This implementation could be improved by moving the field tip closer to the field, creating a tighter visual association.

Overall, this is an approach that works best for fields that users are likely to have "in focus" before making their entry. This is less likely for controls such as radio buttons, check boxes, and drop-down menus.

Dynamic Field Help

When the user's cursor in is a field, the related field help displays on the right. The appearance of caught my eye, bringing my attention to it (this type of text tends to be overlooked, which can lead to errors). This solution also eliminates the clutter of exposing all the field help on the form.

From: Multiply

Help Drawer

Under the possible selections, users can open a "help drawer" to find out more about the options. This is a nice alternative to the help pop-up because it's anchored to the context on the page.

Drawer Closed:

Drawer Open (on click):

From: Wetpaint